 | |
 April 8, 1968 issue | |
| Editor | David Haskell |
|---|---|
| Categories | General interest |
| Frequency | Biweekly |
| Publisher | New York Media |
| Total circulation | 439,135[1] |
| First issue | April 8, 1968; 57 years ago (1968-04-08) |
| Company | Vox Media[2] |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City |
| Language | English |
| Website | nymag |
| ISSN | 0028-7369 |
| OCLC | 1760010 |
New York is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, with a particular emphasis onNew York City.
Founded byClay Felker andMilton Glaser in 1968 as a competitor toThe New Yorker andThe New York Times Magazine, it was brasher in voice and more connected to contemporary city life and commerce, and became a cradle ofNew Journalism.[3] Over time, it became more national in scope, publishing many noteworthy articles about American culture by writers such asTom Wolfe,Jimmy Breslin,Nora Ephron,Pete Hamill,Jacob Weisberg,Michael Wolff,John Heilemann,Frank Rich, andRebecca Traister. It was among the first "lifestyle magazines" meant to appeal to both male and female audiences, and its format and style have been emulated by many American regional and city publications.
New York in its earliest days focused almost entirely on coverage of its namesake city, but beginning in the 1970s, it expanded into reporting and commentary on national politics, notablyRichard Reeves onWatergate,Joe Klein's early cover story aboutBill Clinton,John Heilemann's reporting on the 2008 presidential election that led to his (andMark Halperin's) best-selling bookGame Change,Jonathan Chait's commentary, andOlivia Nuzzi's reporting on thefirst Trump administration.The New Republic praised its "hugely impressive political coverage" during the presidency ofBarack Obama.[4] It is also known for its arts and culture criticism, its food writing (its restaurant criticAdam Platt won aJames Beard Award in 2009, and its Underground Gourmet critics Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld won twoNational Magazine Awards), and its service journalism (its "Strategist" department won seven National Magazine Awards in eleven years).
Since its sale, redesign, and relaunch in 2004, the magazine has won severalNational Magazine Awards, including the award for general excellence in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016, as well as the 2013 award for Magazine of the Year.[5] Since thePulitzer Prize forCriticism opened to magazines as well as newspapers in 2016,New York's critics have won twice (Jerry Saltz in 2018, andAndrea Long Chu in 2023) and been finalists three more times (Justin Davidson in 2020, Craig Jenkins in 2021, and Sara Holdren in 2024). In 2009, theWashington Post media criticHoward Kurtz wrote that "the nation's best and most-imitated city magazine is often not about the city—at least not in the overcrowded, traffic-clogged,five-boroughs sense," observing that it was more regularly publishing political and cultural stories of national and international import.[6]
The magazine's first website, nymetro.com, was launched in 2001. In the early 21st century, the magazine began to diversify that online presence, introducing subject-specific websites under the nymag.com umbrella:Vulture,The Cut,Intelligencer, The Strategist,Curbed, andGrub Street.[7] In 2018, New York Media, the parent company ofNew York magazine, launched adigital subscription product for those sites.[8] On September 24, 2019,Vox Media announced that it had purchasedNew York magazine and its parent company, New York Media.[9]
New York was created in 1963[10] as the Sunday-magazine supplement of theNew York Herald Tribune newspaper. TheHerald Tribune, then in financial difficulty, had recently been sold toJohn Hay Whitney, and was looking to revitalize its business with an increased focus on editorial excellence, which included a relaunch of the Sunday edition and its magazine. Edited first by Sheldon Zalaznick and then byClay Felker, the relaunched magazine, calledNew York, showcased the work of many talentedTribune contributors, includingTom Wolfe,Barbara Goldsmith,Gail Sheehy,Dick Schaap, andJimmy Breslin.[11] TheTribune went out of business in 1966, andNew York was briefly revived as part of a combined paper, theWorld Journal Tribune, that lasted until May 1967. Shortly after theWJT closed, Felker and his partner,Milton Glaser, purchased the rights to the nameplate, backed byWall Street bankers led byArmand G. Erpf (the magazine's first chairman, who Felker attributed as the financial architect of the magazine[12][13]) and C. Gerald Goldsmith (Barbara Goldsmith's husband at the time),[3][14][15] and reincarnated the magazine as a stand-alone glossy weekly. Joining them was managing editor Jack Nessel, Felker's number-two at theHerald Tribune.New York's first issue was dated April 8, 1968.[16] Several writers came from the magazine's earlier incarnation, including Breslin, Wolfe (who wrote "You and Your Big Mouth: How the Honks and Wonks Reveal the Phonetic Truth about Status" in the inaugural issue), andGeorge Goodman, a financial writer who wrote under the pseudonym "Adam Smith." Glaser and his deputy Walter Bernard designed and laid out the magazine and hired many notable artists, includingJim McMullan,Robert Grossman, andDavid Levine, to produce covers and illustrations.
Within a year, Felker had assembled a team of contributors who would come to define the magazine's voice. Breslin became a regular, as didNicholas Pileggi,Gail Sheehy, andGloria Steinem, who wrote a politics column.Judith Crist wrote movie reviews.Harold Clurman was hired as the theater critic, then replaced a few months later byJohn Simon, who became notorious for his harsh reviews.[17]Alan Rich covered the classical-music scene.Barbara Goldsmith wrote a series called "The Creative Environment", in which she interviewed such subjects asMarcel Breuer,I. M. Pei,George Balanchine, andPablo Picasso about their process.Gael Greene, writing under the rubric "The Insatiable Critic", reviewedrestaurants, cultivating abaroque writing style that leaned heavily on sexualmetaphor.[18] The office for the magazine was on the top floor of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at207 East 32nd Street, which Glaser owned.[19] The magazine did not consistently turn a profit in these early years: One board member, Alan Patricof, later said that "it may have touched into the black for a quarter, then out of it, but it was not significantly profitable."[20]
Wolfe, a regular contributor to the magazine, wrote a story in 1970 that captured the spirit of the magazine (if not the age): "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's". The controversial and often criticized[21][22] article described a benefit party for theBlack Panthers, held inLeonard Bernstein's apartment, in a collision ofhigh culture and low that paralleledNew York magazine's ethos and expressed Wolfe's interest in status and class.
In 1972,New York's year-end issue incorporated a 30-page preview of the first issue ofMs. magazine, edited byGloria Steinem.[11] Gail Sheehy's "The Search for Grey Gardens", a cover story about the notoriousmother-and-daughter Beale household of East Hampton, led to theMaysles brothers' acclaimeddocumentary.
As the 1970s progressed, Felker continued to broaden the magazine's editorial vision beyond Manhattan, coveringRichard Nixon and theWatergate scandal closely. He also launchedNew West, a sister magazine onNew York's model that coveredCalifornia life, published in separate Northern California and Southern California editions. In 1976,journalistNik Cohn wrote a story called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", about a young man in aworking-classBrooklyn neighborhood who, once a week, went to a localdisco called Odyssey 2001; the story was a sensation and served as the basis for the filmSaturday Night Fever. Twenty years later, in a followup story inNew York,[23] Cohn admitted that he had made up the character and most of the story.
In 1976, the Australian media baronRupert Murdoch bought the magazine in ahostile takeover, forcing Felker and Glaser out.[24] A succession of top editors followed through the remainder of the decade, includingJames Brady, Joe Armstrong (who also served as publisher),John Berendt, and (briefly)Jane Amsterdam.
In 1980, Murdoch hiredEdward Kosner, the former editor ofNewsweek, to replace Armstrong. Murdoch also boughtCue, alistings magazine founded by Mort Glankoff that had covered the city since 1932, and folded it intoNew York, simultaneously creating a useful going-out guide and eliminating a competitor.[25][26] Kosner's magazine shifted the mix of the magazine toward newsmagazine-style cover stories, trend pieces, and pure "service" features—long articles on shopping and other consumer subjects—as well as close coverage of the glitzy 1980s New York City scene epitomized by financiersDonald Trump andSaul Steinberg. The magazine wasprofitable for most of the 1980s.[26] The term "theBrat Pack" was coined for a 1985 cover story in the magazine.[27]
Murdoch got out of the magazine business in 1991 by selling his holdings to K-III Communications (nowRent Group), a partnership controlled by financierHenry Kravis. Subsequent budget pressure from K-III frustrated Kosner, and he left in 1993, taking over the editorship ofEsquire magazine.[28] After several months during which the magazine was run by managing editor Peter Herbst, K-III hiredKurt Andersen, the co-creator ofSpy, a humor monthly of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Andersen quickly replaced several staff members, bringing in emerging and established writers (includingJim Cramer,Walter Kirn,Michael Tomasky, andJacob Weisberg) and editors (including Michael Hirschorn, Kim France,Dany Levy, and Maer Roshan), and generally making the magazine faster-paced, younger in outlook, and more knowing in tone.[29] In August 1996,Bill Reilly fired Andersen from his editorship, citing the publication's financial results.[30] According to Andersen, he was fired for refusing to kill a story about a rivalry between investment bankersFelix Rohatyn andSteven Rattner that had upsetHenry Kravis, a member of the firm's ownership group.[31] His replacement was Caroline Miller, who came fromSeventeen, another K-III title. In part owing to the company's financial constraints, Miller and her editors focused on cultivating younger writers, includingAriel Levy,Jennifer Senior,Robert Kolker, andVanessa Grigoriadis.[32] She also hiredMichael Wolff, whose writing about media and politics became an extremely popular component of the magazine.
The magazine's first website, under the url nymetro.com, appeared in 2001.[33] In 2002 and 2003,Wolff, the media critic Miller had hired in 1998, won twoNational Magazine Awards for his columns. At the end of 2003,New York was sold again, to a family trust controlled by financierBruce Wasserstein, for $55 million.[34] Wasserstein, early in 2004, replaced Miller withAdam Moss, who had founded the short-lived New York weekly7 Days and then editedThe New York Times Magazine.[35] That fall, Moss and his staff relaunched the magazine, most notably with two new sections: "The Strategist", devoted mostly to service, food, and shopping, and "The Culture Pages", covering the city's arts scene. Moss also rehired Kurt Andersen as a columnist. In early 2006, the company relaunched the magazine's website, previously nymetro.com, as nymag.com.
New York in this period won design awards at theNational Magazine Awards and was named Magazine of the Year by theSociety of Publication Designers (SPD) in 2006 and 2007. A 2008 cover aboutEliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal, created by the artistBarbara Kruger and displaying the word "Brain" with an arrow pointed at Spitzer's crotch, was named Cover of the Year by theAmerican Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) andAdvertising Age. The next year, another cover, "Bernie Madoff, Monster", was named Best News & Business Cover by ASME.New York won back-to-back ASME Cover of the Year awards in 2012 and 2013, for "Is She Just Too Old for This?" and "The City and the Storm" respectively. Design director Chris Dixon and photography director Jody Quon were named "Design Team of the Year" byAdweek in 2008.
WhenBruce Wasserstein died in 2009,David Carr ofThe New York Times wrote that "While previous owners had required constant features in the magazine about the best place to get a croissant or a beret, it was clear that Wasserstein wanted a publication that was the best place to learn about the complicated apparatus that is modern New York. In enabling as much, Mr. Wasserstein recaptured the original intent of the magazine's founder,Clay Felker."[36] Wasserstein's children retained control of the magazine, which continued to be overseen by his deputy Anup Bagaria.[37]
In 2006,New York's website, NYMag.com, underwent a year-long relaunch, transforming from a site that principally republished the magazine's content to an up-to-the-minute news- and- service destination. In 2008, parent company New York Media also purchased the restaurant- and-menu site MenuPages as a complement to its own restaurant coverage, reselling it[38] in 2011 to Seamless.[39]
With the launch of Grub Street, devoted to food, and Daily Intelligencer (later renamed just "Intelligencer"), its politics site, both in 2006; Vulture, its culture site, in 2007; and The Cut, its fashion-and-women's-interest site, in 2008,New York began shifting significant resources toward digital-only publication. These sites were intended to adapt the urbane sensibility of the print magazine for a national and international audience, and attract readership that had been lost by print magazines in general, particularly fashion and entertainment outlets. By July 2010, digital ads accounted for one-third of the company's advertising revenue.David Carr noted in an August 2010 column, "In a way,New York magazine is fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached."[40]
On March 1, 2011, it was announced thatFrank Rich would leaveThe New York Times to become an essayist and editor-at-large forNew York.[41]
New York's "Encyclopedia of 9/11", published on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, was described byGizmodo as "heartbreaking, locked in the past, and entirely current"; the issue won a National Magazine Award for Single-Topic Issue.[42][43]
In October 2012,New York's offices in lower Manhattan were without electricity in the week followingHurricane Sandy, so the editorial staff published an issue from a quickly constructed temporary newsroom in the midtown office of Wasserstein & Company.[44] The issue's cover, shot by photographer Iwan Baan from a helicopter and showing Manhattan half in darkness, almost immediately became an iconic image of the storm;[45]Time called it the magazine cover of the year.[46] The image was republished as a poster by the Museum of Modern Art, with proceeds benefiting Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.[47] The following spring,New York took the top honor at the National Magazine Awards, again receiving the Magazine of the Year award for its print and digital coverage.[5]
In December 2013, as readership for its digital sites continued to build, the magazine announced plans to shift the print edition to biweekly publication the following March, reducing from 42 issues per year to 26 plus three special editions.[48]
In April 2016, the magazine announced the launch of Select All, a new vertical dedicated to technology and innovation.[49] In 2019, Select All was shuttered and folded into the broadened "Intelligencer" news site.
In the mid-2010s,New York launched several podcasts jointly produced with other outlets, all short-lived. Its first independently owned podcast, Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, hosted by Jesse David Fox, launched in February 2017. The magazine also expanded into television, collaborating with Michael Hirschorn's Ish Entertainment andBravo to produce a pilot for a weekly. TV show based on its popular back-page feature, the Approval Matrix.[50]New York's art critic Jerry Saltz appeared as a judge on Bravo's reality competition seriesWork of Art: The Next Great Artist in 2010 and 2011.[51] Grub Street senior editor Alan Sytsma appeared as a guest on judge on three episodes of thethird season ofTop Chef Masters.
April 2018 wasNew York's 50th anniversary, marked with a book-length history of the magazine and its city, published bySimon & Schuster and titledHighbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable: 50 Years of New York. The magazine also produced a commemorative issue and celebrated with a party atKatz's Delicatessen. That year, The Cut introduced its podcast, "The Cut on Tuesdays", produced jointly with Gimlet Media and hosted by one of the site's writers, Molly Fischer.
In December 2018,New York's fashion and beauty destination site, The Cut, carried a piece titled "IsPriyanka Chopra andNick Jonas's Love for Real?", that drew severe backlash from readers for accusingChopra of trappingJonas into a fraudulent relationship and calling her a "global scam artist". The publication removed the piece the following morning and issued an apology.[52][53]
In January 2019, Moss announced that he was retiring from the editorship.David Haskell, one of his chief deputies, succeeded him as editor on April 1, 2019. That spring, the magazine laid off several staff members and temporary employees.[54]
On September 24, 2019,Vox Media announced that it had purchased the magazine's parent company, New York Media LLC.[9] Pam Wasserstein, the CEO of New York Media, became Vox Media's president, working closely with its CEO,Jim Bankoff.
After the merger with Vox Media, May 2020,Vox Media announced it was merging the real estate siteCurbed intoNew York and refocusing the site on its roots in New York City.[55] That year,New York also expanded its podcast business,[56] addingPivot,On With Kara Swisher,Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel,Switched on Pop, andInto It With Sam Sanders to its lineup. The company also saw an expansion of its intellectual property into television and movies, notably withHustlers, a feature film adapted from a story by Jessica Pressler. In 2022, three television series adapted fromNew York properties appeared:Inventing Anna andThe Watcher on Netflix, andSex Diaries on HBO. The magazine also moved into publishing an array of digital newsletters, including "Are U Coming?", which documented the nightlife of city emerging from Covid lockdown; "The Year I Ate New York", written in 2022 by Tammie Taclamarian and in 2023 by E. Alex Jung; and a collection of limited-series newsletters devoted toSuccession,…And Just Like That, and prominent New York City court cases.
Notable stories published byNew York in this decade includeNicholson Baker's investigation of the possibility that a lab leak instigated the COVID-19 epidemic; a cover package, "Ten Years Since Trayvon," about the rise of theBlack Lives Matter movement; and "The Year of theNepo Baby," a widely discussed feature about dynastic career advancement in Hollywood.Lindsay Peoples became the editor of The Cut in 2021, and Vulture hired book criticAndrea Long Chu, who subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
New York magazine has long run literary competitions and distinctivecrossword puzzles. For the first year of the magazine's existence, the composer and lyricistStephen Sondheim contributed an extremely complexcryptic crossword to every third issue. Sondheim eventually ceded the job in order to write his next musical, andRichard Maltby, Jr. took over. For many years the magazine also syndicatedThe Times of London's cryptic crossword.
Beginning in early 1969, for two weeks out of every three, Sondheim's friend Mary Ann Madden edited[57] an extremely popular witty literary competition calling for readers to send in humorous poetry or other bits of wordplay on a given theme that changed with each installment. (A typical entry, in a competition calling for humorous epitaphs, supplied this one for Geronimo: "Requiescat in Apache.") Altogether, Madden ran 973 installments of the competition, retiring in 2000. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of entries were received each week, and winners includedDavid Mamet,Herb Sargent, andDan Greenburg.David Halberstam once claimed that he had submitted entries 137 times without winning. Madden published three volumes of Competition winners, titledThank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise,Son of Giant Sea Tortoise, andMaybe He's Dead: And Other Hilarious Results of New York Magazine Competitions.
Beginning in 1980, the magazine ran an American-style crossword constructed byMaura B. Jacobson. Jacobson retired in April 2011, having created 1,400 puzzles for the magazine, after which the job passed to Cathy Allis Millhauser and then Matt Gaffney.[58] In January 2020,Vulture began publishing daily 10x10 crosswords by two constructors, Malaika Handa and Stella Zawistowski.[59]
New York's news blog was introduced under the name Daily Intelligencer, expanding upon the weekly magazine's front-of-the-book Intelligencer section. Launched in 2006, it was initially written mostly byJessica Pressler and Chris Rovzar, whose coverage focused on local politics, media, and Wall Street but also included extensive chatter about the television showGossip Girl. Over its first half-decade, the site expanded in reach and became more focused on national politics, notably with the addition of columnistJonathan Chait in 2011 and the longtime political blogger Ed Kilgore in 2015.
The Cut launched on theNew York website in 2008, edited by Amy Odell, to replace a previousfashion week blog,Show & Talk.[60] In 2012 it became a standalone website,[61] shifting focus from fashion to women's issues more generally.[60] Stella Bugbee became editor-in-chief in 2017, and presided over a relaunch that appeared on August 21.[62] The new site was designed for an enhanced mobile-first experience and to better reflect the topics covered.[63] In January 2018,The Cut published Moira Donegan's essay revealing her as the creator of the controversial "Shitty Media Men" list, a viral but short-lived anonymous spreadsheetcrowdsourcing unconfirmed reports of sexual misconduct by men in journalism.[64] That August, the site also published "Everywhere and Nowhere," Lindsay Peoples's essay about the fashion industry's inhospitability to Black voices and points of view.[65] In 2019,The Cut published an excerpt fromE. Jean Carroll's book,What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, mostly aboutDonald J. Trump's sexual assault on her.[66] In 2021, Peoples became the site's next editor-in-chief.The Cut also incorporates the pop-science rubricScience of Us, which previously existed as a standalone site. In 2024, 'The Cut' published an article in which a woman confessed to abusing and neglecting her pet cat, Lucky. Advocates took to social media by storm seeking justice for Lucky.
Grub Street, covering food and restaurants, was expanded in 2009 to five additional cities served by former nymag.com sister site MenuPages.com.[67] In 2013Grub Street announced that it would close its city blogs outside New York and bring a more national focus to GrubStreet.com.[68]
Vulture was launched as a pop culture blog on NYMag.com in 2007. It moved to an independent web address, Vulture.com, in 2012. In 2018, New York Media acquired the comedy news blogSplitsider, folding the operation into theVulture website.[69]
In 2016,New York launched theStrategist, an expansion of a column from the print version ofNew York Magazine that aimed to help readers navigate shopping from theNew York perspective. The site joined otherproduct review sites focusing on providing free product reviews to readers, generating affiliate commissions when readers would purchase a product they recommended. The early editorial team included editors David Haskell and Alexis Swerdloff. Popular recurring franchises include the celebrity-shopping "What I Can't Live Without" series, "Strategist-Approved" gift guides, and beauty reviews by influencer Rio Viera-Newton. TheStrategist does not publish branded content that is paid for by the subject of a story, but it earns revenue throughaffiliate advertising, including the Amazon Associates Program. In 2018, theStrategist experimented with a holiday pop-up shop called I Found It at the Strategist.[70]
In 2020,New York took over the Vox Media websiteCurbed, which had begun by covering New York City real estate and development since 2005 and had grown to cover urbanism and design news in many American cities. That October, Curbed relaunched as aNew York vertical with a new design and a resharpened focus on New York City. Its prominent writers include the Pulitzer Prize–winnerJustin Davidson, the magazine's architecture critic, and Wendy Goodman, its design editor.
Books published byNew York include:
Screen adaptations from stories published inNew York include:
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